Amira (not her real name) began fearing for her family's life after her husband was kidnapped. That fear compelled her to leave everything—her family, friends and comfortable life in Baghdad—and flee to Jordan.

In Jordan, Amira and her sons applied for resettlement with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the organization charged with the protection of refugees—people forced to flee their countries because of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

Eventually, Amira's family was invited to resettle permanently in the United States. They did so with the help of World Relief, a resettlement agency that found Amira's family a modest two-bedroom apartment, connected them with government and state aid, and helped Amira's sons secure jobs as meat packers.

While they work, Amira attends English classes and constantly wonders if her husband is dead or alive.

The Flood of Refugees

When Amira's family arrived in 2008, they were just three of the 60,192 refugees admitted to America that year, three of the nearly 5 million people displaced by violence in Iraq since 2003 and three of the nearly 15.2 million refugees worldwide. Besides Iraq, most refugees resettling in America today are from Bhutan and Burma, where a 20-year ethnic cleansing has forced nearly 100,000 Bhutanese and 250,000 Burmese to flee to refugee camps, which are established to contain the refugees who otherwise are flooding into neighboring countries.

Once at a camp, refugees cannot leave until they're invited to return to their homeland or resettle elsewhere, which less than 1 percent are allowed to do. For those contained in refugee camps, life is on hold as they try to survive in makeshift shelters with scarce food, medical care and jobs.

For those refugees fortunate enough to resettle in another place, life remains challenging. Many refugees find it difficult to become self-sufficient and adapt to a new culture and language or begin working in a job that bears little resemblance to what they did in their home country. As one refugee said, "We've been waiting at the starting block for years. Now we can go. We just don't know how to go."

That's why refugees need people to walk alongside them, to teach them how to go. Who better to do this than the Christians who worship Jesus, a refugee forced to flee to Egypt as a toddler to avoid being killed by King Herod?

We are, after all, a church called to "be hospitable to one another without grumbling" and "to look after orphans and widows in their distress" (1 Pet. 4:9 and James 1:27).

Through refugee ministry, we can fulfill these biblical mandates by ministering to the 60,000 to 80,000 refugees who are resettled each year in our communities, in nearly every state, without the expense of travel. We also can engage youth in longterm, multi-generational mission opportunities with their families and church communities that eventually become integrated into their daily lives.